skalibs

What is it ?

skalibs is a package centralizing the free software / open source C development
files used for building all software at skarnet.org: it contains essentially
general-purpose libraries.
You will need to install skalibs if you plan to build skarnet.org software.
The point is that you won't have to download and compile big libraries, and care
about portability issues,
everytime you need to build a package: do it only once.

skalibs can also be used as a sound basic start for C development. There
are a lot of general-purpose libraries out there; but if your main goal is
to produce small and secure C code with a focus on system
programming, skalibs might be for you.

Compilation

skalibs sports a few uncommon options to its ./configure script.
This page documents them in detail.

Upgrade notes

This page lists the differences to be aware of between
the previous versions of skalibs and the current one.

Cross-compilation

Cross-compilation is tricky. skalibs provides system-agnostic interfaces, so all the
other skarnet.org packages cross-compile easily; but some effort needs to be made to
cross-compile skalibs, see this page.

Reference

Libraries

Similar work

Here are a few other libraries originating from the same place as
skalibs, i.e. people start to reuse and package, or rewrite,
code from Dan J. Bernstein, and then patch
after patch, addition after addition, the code evolves into a project
of its own: